


The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

by Anonymous



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: First Meetings, Fluff, M/M, no beta we die like the 2020 international wtnv liveshow tour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:15:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29745552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Carlos saw beauty in the town around him. It was a brushstroke of purple, and sand, and community, in a way he had never seen before. He had only been in Night Vale for a short while. He had also been in Night Vale his entire life. Carlos couldn’t explain this feeling scientifically, and so he only described it to himself.
Relationships: Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12
Collections: Anonymous





	The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

**Author's Note:**

> Found this in deep in my google drive. enjoy me not editing it even a little bit. i'm sure it was unfinished but im too lazy to reread

_ The first time, ever I saw your face _

_ I thought the sun rose in your eyes _

Time, Carlos had come to discover, did not work correctly in Night Vale. This should have been more disturbing to him. It  _ would _ have been more disturbing to him, if he hadn’t also been juggling wild seismic shifts, a house that doesn’t exist, and the rather unsettling feeling that someone was watching him when he was alone in his apartment. 

Still, Carlos saw beauty in the town around him. It was a brushstroke of purple, and sand, and community, in a way he had never seen before. He had only been in Night Vale for a short while. He had also been in Night Vale his entire life. Carlos couldn’t explain this feeling scientifically, and so he only described it to himself. 

It felt like the photofluorescence of a culture he had CRISPRed into glowing, only to realize that he had used the wrong DNA sequence, and it should have died instead. It felt like an archaeology excavation where you found a fossil, except it was still alive. It felt like dying. It felt like finally living. 

Needless to say, Carlos was having a difficult time adjusting to his new town, and he had only been here for one day.

This was why he tried to spend as much time with his team of scientists as he could. They, too, were ‘interlopers’ to the town, and understood what he was going through. At least, as much as one human could understand the shared experience of another with a completely different set of memories and personality traits. 

Yesterday, Carlos had spent the entire day doing science, except for the fifteen-minute break to give a press conference at the town meeting. He ran all over town, first, to the house that doesn’t exist, then to the monitoring station near room 800, then back to the lab, and everything he encountered made even less sense than the thing before it. 

Maybe, he thought to himself, he was rushing things. Maybe there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for each of these phenomena

In one of the fluorescently-lit hallways of the Night Vale Community College, Carlos spoke to a group of his scientists in hushed tones. 

“If we can all see each other in this room, there has to be light coming from somewhere, right?” he asked the group, who nodded. “ _ Then why aren’t there any lights on the ceiling? _ ”

His colleagues looked up in horror, where, instead of light bulbs or chandeliers or windows, there was just an endless expanse of smooth concrete. Their panic grew as their eyes scrambled around, to walls, to the floor, to the end of a hallway, desperate to find a source of the light. 

Carlos, too, looked around. Maybe he had missed one very powerful light bulb somewhere. What he saw, instead, was like looking straight into the sun.

A man was walking towards him. 

Well, that wasn’t quite right. 

A beautiful man was  _ sauntering  _ towards him. Carlos felt his breath stick in his throat. This man was dressed like a campy college professor, and Carlos’s jaw dropped to the floor. He was  _ breathtaking. _

The man was looking at Carlos as he walked by. Carlos stared into his effervescent violet eyes (violet? what the damn hell?), and the man seemed to recognize him. He smirked in Carlos’s direction, and Carlos could only manage a stunned cordial nod in return. 

The man was now past him and his group of scientists, hips swaying as he turned the corner towards the Communications department. 

Carlos could not remember how to think. 

_ And the moon and the stars _

_ Were the gifts you gave _

Later, Carlos would run in and out of the radio station, frantically waving his geiger counter and trying to evacuate the building, but he didn’t know this yet. He didn’t know that one day, he would be bleeding out on the floor of a bowling alley with only one regret. He didn’t know that Aubergine was a good name for a dog, and he certainly didn’t know that on the night of his wedding, almost three years later, the sky would open and cry tears of joy onto the reception party. He only knew a beautiful stranger, and that was enough.

_ To the dark, and the endless skies _

_ My Love _


End file.
